Public opinion contains all kinds of falsity and truth, but it takes a great man to find the truth in it. The great man of the age is the one who can… - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Every kind of falsehood and truth is present in public opinion, but it is the prerogative of the great man to discover the truth within it. He who expresses the will of his age, tells it what its will is, and accomplishes this will, is the great man of the age.

You know my present occupation and why I am pursuing it. You know also that I always had a penchant for politics. But this interest has been weakened by journalism far more than it has found sustenance in it. I have to look at political news from a different point of view from that of the reader. The important thing for the reader is content. For me a news item has interest as an article filling a page. But the diminished enjoyment afforded by the satisfaction of my political curiosity has its compensations. In the first place, income. I have convinced myself by experience of the truth of the biblical text which I have made my guiding light: “Strive ye first after food and clothing, and the Kingdom of God will fall to you as well’’ [reversal of Matthew 6:33]. The second advantage is that a journalist is himself an object of curiosity and almost of envy, in that everybody wants to know what he is holding secretly [in petto]—which, according to the universal persuasion, is surely the best part. But just between us, I never know more than what appears in my newspaper, and often not even that much.

In connection with Kant we must here begin by speaking of Jacobi, whose philosophy is contemporaneous with that of Kant; in both of these the advance beyond the preceding period is very evident. The result in the two cases is much the same, although both the starting point and the method of progression are somewhat different. In Jacobi's case the stimulus was given mainly by French philosophy, with which he was very conversant, and also by German metaphysics, while Kant began rather from the English side, that is, from the skepticism of Hume. Jacobi, in that negative attitude which he preserved as well as Kant, kept before him the objective aspect of the method of knowledge, and specially considered it, for he declared knowledge to be in its content incapable of recognizing the Absolute: the truth must be concrete, present, but not finite. Kant does not consider the content, but took the view of knowledge being subjective; and for this reason he declared it to be incapable of recognizing absolute existence. To Kant knowledge is thus a knowledge of phenomena only, not because the categories are merely limited and finite, but because they are subjective. To Jacobi, on the other hand, the chief point is that the categories are not merely subjective, but that they themselves are conditioned. This is an essential difference between the two points of view, even if they both arrive at the same result.

The most obvious symptoms of an epoch-making system are the misunderstandings and the awkward conduct of its adversaries.